 The California Health Care Foundation is dedicated to advancing meaningful, measurable improvements in the way the health care delivery system provides care to the people of California. How does this impact the community on a national and local level? With me today is Stephen Burnbound, Senior Communications Officer at California Health Care Foundation, which has been investing in health care coverage for more than 20 years and just did an evaluation of their work. So let's start with that. We just commissioned an assessment report from the Aston Institute, and that has cataloged some of our investments. And so to go back to your question, we've been investing in capacity building, we've been investing in public media health reporter positions, and then we've been also investing in data journalism. So those are the three main areas. I'm familiar with Healthline because it's come across by speed in different ways. So what are examples that people in California might have, or they might not know that you're helping fund it? Yeah. So California Healthline, which is the one you mentioned, is a daily news digest that also has a lot of original reporting, and it's produced by Kaiser Health News. We also fund five public media stations throughout California in the major markets. So Fresno, LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, and San Diego. And then the third one is the USC Data Journalism Fellowship, which is from the USC Center for Health Journalism, and that's really building skills of health reporters who can then go on to do data journalism projects. And they all work synergistically. That's what we were really excited about from this Aspen report. And so what did you figure out? From the Aspen report, they basically went out and talked to all of the fundees or the grantees, I should say, the ones that you've been supporting. So what's working well? Let's start with that. Yeah. Aspen went out and talked to about 80 different stakeholders. It includes reporters, editors, people at high levels in the newsroom. It talked to our folks who read California Healthline, other stakeholders, I would say, of our audience. And it found that these investments are having an impact, that they're helping to buttress the health journalism ecosystem in California, which has changed remarkably just like everywhere else in the past 20 years since we've been making these grants. Because there used to be health reporters that used to be a bee, that used to be part of a local newspaper or an ecosystem, but that's been decimated in a lot of places. Yeah. And what I also think is interesting is we started out funding not-for-profit journalism, and it wasn't necessarily the shiny new thing, and now it's kind of come full circle. So these investments we've been making, these relationships we've had, turn out to be really powerful because that's kind of who's left at this point is the not-for-profit journalism, particularly public media, and we're starting to see lots of examples of collaboration between public media organizations, and all three of these investments kind of work in tandem because you'll see a reporter from, say, Capital Public Radio do a story, and then that story will end up in California Healthline, and it turns out that the reporter also did a data fellowship, and so you're just seeing this kind of, this buttressing effect, and that's really the most we could hope for in this situation. And Sanau, what are the areas of improvement? What do you hope to be able to do differently after looking at this dive that Aspen took into your programs? Yeah, there's definitely room for improvement. I think one area is focusing more on ethnic media. We haven't cracked that nut before, and so part two of this project is to ask Aspen to go and do a landscape report about how we could fund ethnic media more than we're doing. There are drips and drabs of examples, but it hasn't been a concerted effort, and part of that is also getting these existing grantees to work with ethnic media. Traditionally, it's been more of, at least with California Healthline, it's been more of they're working with ethnic media to distribute California Healthline's content, but not necessarily take the content from the ethnic media outlets and distribute it on California Healthline, so I think there's work to be done there. We also found one of the big takeaways was that community engagement, which is this kind of hot new buzzword, is very effective, and so we are actually starting a little mini community engagement fund to help our public media grantees spread the work when they have a project and they feel like they need to do a listening session or they need to go out into the community, so we're really excited about that. Yeah, it's interesting because you didn't have to think about the distribution when there was kind of this stable idea that I'm going to publish my work, my paper's going to carry it, it's going to land on all these doorsteps or whatever. And now it seems like that's actually part of designing some sort of a long story or project or a feature, so how do I actually get this in front of the people that will be impacted by it? It's true. Getting a read on what people are listening to and really being closer to them is something that I think public media has picked up on in the last few years, and I'm noticing, you know, I'm very into trendspotting and I'm noticing all the different public media stations have community engagement, editors and managers, they're starting to use their spaces for events to try to bring people in. And I think what the bridge is to try to get the people who aren't traditional public media listeners and watchers to trust that the reporters and the stations are going to report on them in a positive way, that it's not just disparities reporting, and, you know, it's a great way to hopefully grow new audiences for them. Have you found, at least or at least from the different reporting that you support, that there is an increase in the amount of disinformation or misinformation in the health space? I mean, you know, they're basically people getting what they would consider a health fact from an unreliable source and that your reporters are trying to dispel these rumors. It's an interesting question. I'm more focused and the foundation is more focused on dealing with the health industry and providers and Sacramento folks. And so there I'd say a different audience than the general public. I do think that it comes back to trust and, you know, there are high ratings for for public media when it comes to trust. So we feel pretty good about that. I think what happens is when there isn't enough local reporting, then those stories don't even happen. And what happens is maybe the the local health system gets a free pass if they're doing something where the the local politician isn't held accountable. And so that's really one of the the downsides of the loss of all this local journalism is the stories that aren't getting written on those subjects. So how do you how do you engage or encourage more people to get into this space and say that picking off a particular beat is a good way to have a kind of long term impact? If you want to support in the health care space, if you want to support, let's say it's good governance and support somebody to show up at the the city council meetings week after week because nobody does that anymore. Yeah, it's hard. I mean, we we as as foundations, you know, everyone looks to us and says, OK, you have the resources to fund this. But in California, for example, our foundation makes grants of about thirty five million dollars a year as our old CEOs to say that's what Medi-Cal spends in the morning. So in a state the size of California, you can't fund everything. We're actually doing a lot with journalism proportional to the size of our foundation. That's because we have such a belief in it. But I think it's about priorities. And I also think it's about collaborations and partnerships. And that to me is one of the the most positive things about this new era, is that as not for profit journalism has become ascendant, there is less competitive instincts between people. And hopefully that's going to spread to foundations doing the same thing and and sharing their resources so that we can we can have a greater effect together. Whether it was through this Aspen report or anecdotally, what have you found that works when it comes to that collaboration between these different partners? And you said that you've got data fellows, you've got different types of journalism that you're supporting. How is there any way that as on a foundation level, you can encourage that synergistic behavior to occur more often? Yeah, I mean, we we we try to bring people together. That's a big function of what we are. We're conveners and collaborators. I think one of the great benefits is that we've been doing this for 20 years. And so people know us. There's a big trust factor. It's a little bit of a side note, but I think one of the things that Aspen found was maintaining that editorial firewall actually increases the ability for these grants to work better. And we really pride ourselves on not dictating what the grantees should cover. And by doing that, they feel confident that they can go about and doing their work. So, yeah, it's about it's about getting the grantees you have to work together, if possible. There's a great example. We were both just in this session on local journalism. And in California, there's a collaboration between CalMatters and five public media stations. Well, it turns out we are a funder of all of those guys. And, you know, it wasn't that we were pushing it. But when you start to see the same names over and over again, you can you can build on that in a way. So a lot of it is about them being innovative and then you supporting them. All right, Paul Berenbaum, thanks so much. Nice to meet you. Thank you.